Ridge Line Offices

A software company wanted a headquarters that felt like a small campus rather than a single object, on a sloping site the previous scheme had proposed to flatten. The client's instinct — which PLINTH shared — was that the slope was the best thing about the property.

The design is four office bars stepped down the contour, each one a half-level below the last, linked by a continuous circulation spine that runs the length of the ridge. Nobody works more than a few steps from a terrace cut into the roof of the bar below, and the stepping means every floor plate gets its own horizon.

Because the bars follow the existing grade, the project moved almost no earth — the cut from one bar's foundation became the fill for the next. The structure is a straightforward concrete frame, left exposed inside, with deep external fins on the west elevations to handle the afternoon sun.

The result reads from the valley as a set of low horizontal lines drawn along the ridge, which is exactly the restraint a tech headquarters of this size rarely allows itself.