HOK Creates a Streamlined Office for a Freight Rail Operator in Atlanta

Transportation company Norfolk Southern Corporation traces its history back to 1827. But today it’s firmly rooted in the 21st century. Its subsidiary, Norfolk Southern Railway Company, which oversees 19,000 miles of train tracks across 22 states, relies on technology to ensure safety, move goods efficiently, and reduce fuel emissions. But to be innovative and nimble—and attract top coders and engineers—NS needed to consolidate into a state-of-the-art headquarters. For decades, the corporation was based in Norfolk, Virginia, but its operations and technology teams were in Atlanta. In 2018, NS decided to bring everyone together, and HOK won the bid for the interiors of a new 750,000-square-foot complex in Midtown Atlanta’s Tech Square.

“The client didn’t want this to be treated like a train museum,” HOK firm-wide director of interiors Tom Polucci begins. “The existing buildings had beautiful models of locomotives, but NS said, ‘No, we’re more sophisticated than that.’” Betsy Nurse, HOK Atlanta’s director of interiors, adds: “Norfolk Southern sees itself as a tech company, not a railroad company.” The client envisioned a timeless concept where track workers and administrators alike would feel at home, with ample flex spaces to help the 3,000 on-site employees meet and collaborate. Robust amenities—fitness center, food hall, game room, childcare center—would help the company compete for talent against the likes of Google.

With architecture by Pickard Chilton, the ground-up headquarters is composed of two office towers (10 and 17 stories tall) joined by a five-story podium, which houses the lobby, amenities, and parking. HOK was at the table from the beginning and helped shape some of the architectural solutions, especially in the podium. The parking deck constrained the volume that would become the lobby, which could have been one to three stories high. “We studied different options and how the floors wove together,” Polucci says. The team landed on a 32-foot-high lobby that’s open to loungelike collaboration zones on the second floor and creates energy and buzz. This gave HOK the opportunity to create a monumental circular stair, the defining element of the interior.

The firm conceived of the stair as an iconic sculpture that would make the headquarters unique. Its ribbon of Corian-clad steel twists from the ground floor to the fourth, but the white-oak treads only begin on level two. In the lobby—detached from the stairs for security reasons—the Corian curls to wrap the reception desk. “Our goal was a pure form,” Polucci says. “The ribbon is consistent all the way up; it doesn’t flatten out at each floor.”

The stair grew out of the idea of movement, the guiding theme of the project. “Norfolk Southern was looking to celebrate the idea of motion in subtle, special ways,” Polucci notes. Outside the building’s entrance, a site-specific sculpture evokes tunnels and curved tracks in weathering steel. Nurse points out that the artwork is right outside the lobby, where you can see its relationship to the stair: “One is super refined, the other is raw.”

Artwork populates the interior, as well. In the ground-floor café, which is open to the public, there’s a 19-foot-high mural by HOK’s Experience Design team of a train on a track under a golden moon. Nearby, a painting by local artist María Korol hangs at the end of the main elevator lobby.

On the fourth floor, the stair terminates in front of the network operations center, which is like an air-traffic control room for trains. “From a visitor experience, it tells a story, because you land at the heart of the facility,” Nurse says. The room vividly channels the concept of motion with angular pendant fixtures and 2,000 feet of recessed LED strips that streak across the ceiling and down the walls. The center, which operates 24/7, also glows with blue lighting chosen to be soft on the eyes of dispatchers staring at screens all day.

Employees come together in the fifth-floor canteen that doubles as an all-hands meeting space. Designed like a food hall with six different vendors, it sits between two outdoor terraces; one has a retractable glass wall so the spaces can flow together. Totaling 55,000 square feet, the outdoor areas include another terrace by the gym on the floor below, where employees can do laps on circular walking paths. “Movement is also important to Norfolk Southern from a health and wellness perspective,” Nurse states. Glass-walled stairs in both towers further encourage physical activity.

While the array of amenities might seem like a post-pandemic bid to lure workers back to the office, the program had already been in place. The headquarters was mid-construction in March 2020, and Norfolk Southern stuck to the plan—even keeping a permanent desk for each employee. “That was a key tenant from the beginning,” Annie Adams, Norfolk Southern’s chief transformation officer, says. “It was important that everyone have a space to call their own.” The company, which had a phased move-in that began last fall and was completed in April, had always planned on accommodating hybrid work; meeting rooms are wired to connect remote participants seamlessly. Adams estimates that the headquarters is typically at 80 percent capacity. For her, the project’s success goes well beyond its anticipation of flexible work schedules. “The design reflects who we are and where we’re going,” she says. The future of freight rail, it seems, is right on track.

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HOK: danielle schmitt; kay sargent; diana stanisic; vivien chen; richard saunders; weronika cichosz; francesca meola; crystal latham; valerie roosma; irina sai; erin ezell; emily payne; bethany foss; claire pellettiere; matt mcinerney

HKS: architect of record

OJB: landscape consultant

HOK Experience Design: custom graphics

one lux studio: lighting con­sultant

uzun + case: structural engineer

integral consulting: mep

onsite woodwork corporation: custom fabrication workshop

hitt: general contractor

masland carpets: rug (lobby)

hbf: sofa (lobby), chairs (café)

luum: sofa upholstery (lobby), chair fabric (lounge)

shaw contract: lvt (break room); rugs (break room, lounge), carpet tile (daycare)

Courtesy of Davis Furniture: tables (break room)

jamie stern design: custom banquettes

pollack: banquette upholstery

mortensen woodwork: custom screens (lounge)

curry sawmill co.: custom table

Andreu World: chairs (lounge, café)

Holly Hunt: chair (reception)

art & associates: custom light fixtures (gym entry), custom wallcovering (gym)

wolf-gordon: wallcovering (gym entry)

Bentley Mills: carpet tile (conference center)

russ bassett: workstation (operations center)

lambert & fils: pendant fixtures (café)

nydree floor­ing: floor tile (canteen)

martin brattrud: tables

sandler seating: stools

ton: chairs

nanawall: folding glass wall

atomic 50: ceiling panels (game room)

flor: carpet tile

CB2: ceiling fixtures

hightower: red chairs

ofs: ping pong table

big ass fans: fans (gym)

pliteq: floor tile

flos: track fixtures (daycare)

ef contract: lvt

Dupont: corian

basaltite: stone flooring

kährs: wood flooring

axis lighting; genled brands; hubbell; led linear; 3g lighting; usai lighting: lighting

decoustics; ritz acoustics; usg: acoustical ceilings

benjamin moore & co.: paint

Fogarty Finger Charts a New Course in the Brooklyn Navy Yard With Dock 72

Across the East River from the Lower East Side, the Brooklyn-side shoreline zigzags inward to form Wallabout Bay. This funky stretch of waterfront, once home to Lenape tribespeople and early Dutch settlers, began its modern life as an innovation hub in 1801, when President Adams designated it one of the country’s first Navy yards; during its World War II heyday, it operated six dry docks and employed 70,000 workers. More recently, the since-decommissioned site has been reborn as a hotbed of tech companies and creatives, the home address of healthcare incubators, furniture startups, small-batch juice purveyors, cutting-edge military-gear makers, film sound stages, and the country’s largest rooftop soil farm.

Until now, the majority of redevelopment in the Brooklyn Navy Yard has entailed adaptive reuse of its industrial warehouses. Enter Dock 72, the first ground-up commercial office building to be erected right on the waterfront (and, in fact, one of the largest such structures to be built in the city’s outer boroughs in many decades). The 16-story volume, with base building design by S9 Architecture, sits prowlike on a skinny pier sandwiched between two former dry docks and culminating in a new ferry terminal. In 2015, as construction documents were being drawn up, codevelopers Boston Properties and Rudin Management tapped Fogarty Finger to start conceptualizing interior architecture—from FF&E to art curation—for the entry-level lobby and commissary, second-floor fitness center, and penthouse-level conference center, totaling some 60,000 square feet of amenities. WeWork had already signed on as anchor tenant and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation was naturally involved, too, meaning there were many stakeholders to please—and to align. “Those many players had so many different opinions, which is so New York, right?” says Fogarty Finger director Alexandra Cuber, who led the project with associate director Candace Rimes. “From that delightfully tangled knot of ideas and individual preferences, we had to come up with a strong concept that had enough nuance and depth that everyone could see themselves in it and find a piece they’d contributed to.”

Ultimately, the design team sought to channel both the can-do spirit of the 300-acre industrial park and what Cuber calls its “nautical messaging”: the unique sun-bleached, rust-tinged palette and omnipresent visual language of ship details and graphics. As a guiding narrative, she and Rimes homed in on the Plimsoll Line, a technical symbol on every ship’s hull that denotes the proper immersion level given its load and the density of the water it’s traveling through. FF commissioned a rendering of Plimsoll markings in yellow neon, which now glows beaconlike at the Dock 72 entry—setting the stage for the subsequent journey.

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It’s quite a journey indeed from the front door to reception at the far end of the building, accessed via a 170-foot-long corridor with a glass wall directing eyeballs to the active adjacent dock. “To make that lengthy pathway an enjoyable process required breaking it up into ‘rooms’ that could be occupied and experienced,” Cuber explains. Changes in ancillary seating (from low- to high-back) and flooring (dark- to light-gray terrazzo) demarcate a series of vignettes along this promenade. So do blackened-steel screens and portals that cast a spirited shadow play and reflect the linearity of ship cables, sails, and razzle-dazzle camouflage.

In addition to subdividing space, the steel portals also frame wall murals by area artists who were given free rein to devise compositions that spoke to the context, but assigned a specific color palette reflecting a different type of water from the Plimsoll Line. Bryce Wymer’s depiction of ship-wrangling in a tropical storm pays homage to women who worked in the yard during wartime; an abstract color field by Kristin Texeira, who has a studio in the complex, is painted in summer-water hues.

The murals reflect another guiding principal of the project: a commitment to
locally made design. All art and much of the custom furniture were produced in or near the Navy Yard. “We were passionate about finding the right partners and a diverse group of collaborators,” Rimes notes. “It pushed us to go the extra mile: We walked all around Crown Heights, Bushwick, Greenpoint, and throughout the Navy Yard to find who can make what or submit an idea.”

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Amenities feature a veritable roll call—er, ship’s manifest—of Big Apple talent. For the ground-floor café, Concrete Collaborative crafted tiles in custom colorways derived from photographs of the yard. Dan Funderburgh contributed a lobby mural as well as a nautical-print wallpaper for the second-floor lounge and juice bar. IceStone fabricated recycled-glass table bases in the lobby. And elevator cabs function as intimate viewing rooms for large-scale Navy Yard photographs by Harrison Boyce.

The 16th-floor conference center, with a subdividable 200-capacity town hall space, plus various lounge and meeting areas, is no exception to the city-made mandate, with shapely mirrors by Bower Studios and stacked-stone tables by Souda. What’s different up here is a shift in vibe and materiality, from the pre­dominant white-oak millwork of the lower levels to warmer walnut tones and a darker palette. “The colors become saturated and inky, as if they’ve been soaked in water,” Rimes says. “It’s like being on the deck of a vintage yacht.” A perfect launching point for next-gen captains of industry.

Fogarty Finger: robert finger; tin min fong; garrett rock; allie mathison; taylor fleming; evita fanou; jacob laskowski; carl laffan; chris worton

perkins eastman: Architect of Record:

one lux studio: lighting consultant

let there be neon: custom graphics

ove aruo & partners: structural engineer

cosentini associates: mep

langan: civil engineer

armada; capitol woodwork; zsd: woodwork

argosy designs; gkd metal fabrics: metalwork

concrete works east: concrete work

gilbane; hunter roberts: general contractors

lampiste: custom dome fixtures (lobby)

andrew nyer: pendant globes (hall, café)

oluce: table lamp (hall)

hbf: tripod tables

Maharam: Bench fabric (hall), banquette fabric (meeting room)

filzfelt: felt (elevator lobby)

Hay: chairs (hall, café). la cividina: white tables, wire tables (hall)

johanson: stools

ananda: flooring (studio)

normann copen­hagen: chairs (meeting room)

bower studios: mirror

souda: table (meeting room), side table (lounge)

velis: cab (elevator)

lf illuminations: cylinder fixtures (reception)

acolyte: pendant fixtures

clé tile: floor tile (bar)

brendan ravenhill studio: pendant fix­tures

Stellar Works: stools

milliken: carpet tile (lounge)

sattler: pendant rings

arper: chairs, sofas, ottomans

garsnas: barrel chairs

light originals: pendant fix­tures

gotham lighting: can fixtures

missana: chairs (hall)

concrete collaborative: floor tile (café)

zonca terrazzo: terrazzo flooring

hudson company: wood floor­ing

ceilings plus: custom slat ceilings

trespa: paneling

tagwall: storefront systems