Projects

Uber 11

When Uber acquired the 11th floor of the building it occupies in San Francisco, an initial concern was its distance from the company’s executive offices on the 4th floor. How could people on the 11th feel any sense of community or shared purpose with people seven floors below?  O+A’s solution was to acknowledge the split and make an asset of it. 

When Uber acquired the 11th floor of the building it occupies in San Francisco, an initial concern was its distance from the company’s executive offices on the 4th floor. How could people on the 11th feel any sense of community or shared purpose with people seven floors below?  O+A’s solution was to acknowledge the split and make an asset of it. 

  • City San Francisco, CA

  • Year 2015

  • Size 19,826 sf

  • Team Denise Cherry, Clem Soga, Elizabeth Guerrero, Michelle Richter, Hilary Hanhan, Alma Lopez, Sarah Dziuba, Mindi Weichman

  • Photographer Jasper Sanidad

Seven Floors Removed from Mission Control

Uber 11 is a space for teams to detach from the mother ship and work independently on special projects. It’s the rebellious cousin of the Uber family, still very much of the same genetic make-up, but more openly irreverent. This floor is forever a work in progress—paint in the elevator lobby rises only so high on the wall; drywall in the corridor isn’t painted at all. Exposed ceilings, raw concrete floors—the impact is of something being born, some new configuration formed from classic elements: a start-up.

Ecosystems of Work

But it’s a start-up with a sophisticated understanding of work.  Uber 11 is a collection of team meeting spaces—each tailored to a specific capacity and each a freestanding mini-ecosystem.  These team rooms are equipped with everything necessary to get the job done.  They are linked by pockets of the “populist luxury” that is key to Uber’s central mission:  a lounge space paneled in blackened Douglas fir, an all-hands table beneath blown glass, a game room, a sumptuous kitchen.  Uber’s start-up is deliberately “unfinished,” but it features the same warm textures and elevated execution to be found in the office below.

“You Talking to Me?”

And it’s witty.  Unlike the urban map motifs that pervade Uber’s 4th floor spaces, the branding here is pugnacious, chin out.  Because it’s so personal (and time-specific) humor rarely gets aired in interior design, but Uber 11 is infused with the wit of its mold-breaker image.  Two interior walls are wallpapered with hundreds of individual taxi receipts, a jab at the industry Uber has turned on its head in five years.  Look closely and you may spot a receipt from Travis Bickle.