Studio J. Jih Designs Global Protection Corp.’s New Headquarters with Soft Filters and Iridescent Walls

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Lynn, MA - Studio J.Jih, led by J.Roc Jih (in collaboration with AOR Maugel), has designed a new office, assembly and distribution headquarters for Global Protection Corp., a company manufacturing gender-inclusive safe-sex products with a thirty-year history of innovating in service of public health, queer advocacy, and education. The adaptive reuse renovation filters and partitions the interiors through a series of soft and perceptually malleable architectural surfaces, inserting chain mail curtain, acoustic sheers, dichroic film, and mirrors in place of normative walls. The project spans 65,000 square feet across two stories of a former dairy creamery in Lynn, Massachusetts, a seaside town just north of Greater Boston and is considered to be a core piece of the redevelopment of the city.

The design scope was concentrated primarily on the second floor, where Studio J.Jih looked to create an office space that solved for the contemporary needs of the office typology, which is often subject to conflicting desires. The need for collaborative acoustic and visual continuity is set against the need for focused privacy, while the desire for the warmth and comfort of domestic interiors is set against the requirement for professional meeting spaces such as conference rooms and offices. The desire for small-scale intimacy conflicts with the drive to preserve the character and large scale of the former dairy creamery, and the present need for specific subdivisions, work clusters, and room types is set against future imperatives for flexibility, as the organization continues to grow and evolve.

In order to achieve this, Studio J.Jih devised a strategy that defines the office space through a series of filters, to enable an adjustable gradient of acoustic and visual privacy, and to future-proof for the potential growth or re-arrangement of teams. Expansive undulating surfaces fill the space: curtains of translucent fabric, draped chainmail, and undulating felt partitions enfold space, transmit light, filter sound, and produce space at the scale of offices and collaborative clusters, while being defined by a fundamentally domestic and soft materiality.

The single-occupancy offices receive abundant and direct natural light through their position along the south-facing window facade, and share a translucent, iridescent glass wall that faces out into the common office space. There, a series of translucent acoustic sheer curtains and chainmail layers (by Vescom and Fabricoil, respectively) serve as a system for modulating layers of privacy. Each adjustable layer has the effect of filtering and softening light, and are combined with flexible floor-standing felt partitions, giving the soft pods on the office floor (hexagonal cubicles made of felt from Creative Office Resources) differing degrees of privacy while ensuring gentle, uniform, natural light throughout.

Says J. Roc Jih, “We often see a highly renovated office that is full of design elements referencing the domestic environment, which is often in opposition to adaptability over time. For this project, our strategy became all about diaphanous surfaces that can fit the commercial office in scale, but provide a sense of domesticity through a material softness that scatters and moderates light for the work environment.” Jih continues: “In an incidental, tongue-in-cheek way, the ‘filters’ make reference to the product itself, but it’s really a way of thinking about a condition of translucency overlaid with veils of privacy in the workplace, and how to design for the different types of privacy and collaboration that might be required among co-workers.”

Studio J.Jih composed a new organic arrangement of windows, varying in size and alignment, on the primary facade. These windows facilitate the diversity of lighting conditions within the second floor offices that accommodate the flexible working conditions described above, including high horizontal clerestory windows for deep light penetration without glare, large picture windows for conference rooms, and smaller square windows for light-sensitive locations.

Within each single-occupancy office, a different typological condition of light is produced by differing window placements to accommodate a range of preferences - for example, a high horizontal window provides clerestory lighting for one office, the corner CEO’s office has a large square window, another has a tall slit window, and so on. These specific lighting conditions are each filtered through a dichroic glass wall which separates individual offices from the shared office space, which has the effect of filtering and homogenizing direct light for those collective working environments. This dichroic glass layer also provides an illuminated backdrop for the exhibition of the history of the company and its role in the history of safe sex in America.

This variation in the windows continues on the ground level, which houses storage, staging, assembly and distribution functions for the company. All of the windows on that floor are located high for safety in an industrial zone open into a single large assembly space, including a large 8x8 window close to the ceiling. The windows introduce shafts of light into the space, and bring direct sunlight deep into the floorplan, Says J, ”On the lower level, freed from the lighting requirements of computer screens and glare, we sought to introduce natural beams of light throughout the day, and to reverse the typical lightless conditions warehouse workers face.”

The new headquarters represents the next chapter in Global Protection Corp.'s decades-long tradition of enlisting bold creative partnerships to advance its mission. "Art and design have always been central to our DNA, from our artistic ONE® Condom wrappers to our packaging and safer sex advocacy programs – and this space is the ultimate expression of that. We wanted to create an environment where art and intentional design seamlessly intersect, transforming our everyday workspace into an inspiring visual experience. Seeing this dream come true is an incredible milestone for all of us at Global Protection Corp.," said Davin Wedel, president and founder of Global Protection Corp.®, parent company of ONE® Condoms.

On Adaptive Reuse:

Studio J.Jih and the GPC project team utilized a subtractive approach to carbon reduction, focusing on surgically removing elements of the existing industrial building, finding that the adaptation of the post-industrial American building stock to offices might generate more reusable building materials than those that are added. The process allowed for the reclamation of items like storage tanks and industrial equipment for resale, recycling metals like ducting and cold-rolled steel, and crushing existing masonry, concrete, and asphalt for reuse as aggregate.

This comprehensive reuse effort was aided by Massachusetts' incentivized recycling policies for construction and demolition waste. Interestingly, very little drawing took place at this phase so that drawings were not relied upon - instead, decisions were made on-site and collaboratively among the GC, AOR, Design Architect, Project Manager, Client Rep, and Developer.

The subtractive logic also pertained to the design. Cuts were made to produce functional apertures, new facade conditions, and daylighting. CMU, originally used to infill the industrial steel frame as the fastest and cheapest masonry option, became the key reconciling material in the careful re-seaming and reinforcement of the cut edges. The building’s dimensions had remained consistent across decades of additions, allowing new structure to be cut, patched, reinforced, and bonded to the old with relative ease.

On the additive side, virgin construction was minimized in favor of reused and performance-based materials (as further described in the press release). For example, discards from condom manufacturing — several hundred worn glass molds — were repurposed into a single light fixture that blankets the ceiling of the lobby and meeting spaces.