When Slack asked O+A to create its new multi-floor headquarters in San Francisco one design story presented itself immediately. Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield is an outdoorsman, a hiker who goes off grid every year and recharges in the various types of wilderness—desert, mountains, forest—that make up the Pacific Crest Trail. Because that trail forms a bridge between two of Slack’s offices in Vancouver and San Francisco it seemed a thematic link too rich to pass up. O+A’s concept was to create a floor-byfloor evocation of those landscapes—in effect to turn a trip up the elevator into a virtual trip from Baja to the Pacific Northwest. The idea was to suggest not just a variety of topographical and botanical contexts, but to capture, as well, the experiential links between hiking a wilderness trail—and work.
