- JPMorgan is still continuing with its brand new NYC headquarters, despite 40% less space.
- According to a document shared with Insider, the bank is asking for proposals for ‘universal design’.
- The $ 3 billion tower will have flexible floorboards, a popular real estate after the post-pandemic.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in a letter to shareholders last week that the coronavirus pandemic would “significantly reduce” the company’s need for office space. The bank’s return plans, he added, ask for about 60 desks for every 100 employees.
“Remote work will change how we manage our real estate, ‘Dimon wrote, in italics.
However, Dimon’s promise to downsize does not apply to the brand new headquarters that JPMorgan is building in downtown Manhattan for about 14,000 of its more than 250,000 employees. But as the company continues to work on the $ 3 billion tower, which will begin to rise this year and be completed in 2024, it adapts its interior design to the times.
A construction document provided to Insider by a source with direct knowledge of the bank’s real estate plans pointed to the shift that JPMorgan is providing for the layouts at its headquarters. The firm plans to use a ‘universal design’ for the inside of the 1425-foot tower at 270 Park Avenue.
The document, a request for proposals recently issued by the bank to get a construction manager for the skyscraper project, said that the ideal interior for the 2.5 million square meter skyscraper would be able to accommodate various configurations . A JPMorgan Chase spokesman told Insider the bank is striving for a flexible design, as well as response to the pandemic, as part of a strategy that precedes COVID-19, in which it seeks to make its workspaces more flexible for change work practices and habits.
“We learn from this year and always design our spaces to be flexible to adapt to any business or market changes,” the spokesman said.
The desire for flexibility is an interruption of the prevailing office designs before the pandemic, when most tenants tried to squeeze employees into dense, open layouts that were effective and to promote collaboration.
Now more tenants are trying to build flexibility in spaces to accommodate the office’s evolving and uncertain role in the future. The office can be a place where employees can only work part of the time or on specific tasks or projects, or where they gather mainly for group work, meetings or events.
“Park Avenue 270 is an example of a building that probably has a time frame of four or five years before it is finished, but they have to design it in the next year or so during a very fluid period,” says Emily Sobel, an architect and senior director at Savills who focuses on office design. “We are in a moment of peak change, and designers have a heavy lift to take that we already knew was a need for flexibility and it is now future-proof.”
JPMorgan leases about 170,000 square feet of space it does not need at two other Manhattan buildings, 4 New York Plaza, and 5 Manhattan West, Bloomberg reported in March.
However, the bank is still going to start the construction of the 270 Park Avenue foundation on the entire block between Park and Madison Avenue and 47th and 48th streets. On the same site, workers are demolishing the former headquarters. It was 707 feet long, 52 stories high and it took months to pull apart.
The post-pandemic office may not have ‘rows of desks’
The office’s suddenly amorphous role has translated into a new series of design decisions. The “factory-rich desks” are gone, said Thomas Vecchione, a principal at the boutique interior design and architecture firm Vocon. He said tenants install robust wireless internet to avoid having to attach workstations and desks to fixed connection points so the layout can be easily changed.
Vecchione described a new way of thinking about office design that does not favor allocated seats – commonly known as a ‘hot desk’ system, which Dimon quoted in the shareholders’ letter, and more than enough common spaces where employees can work, but which can also accommodate group meetings and gatherings. Conference rooms or other secluded spaces within an office are now deliberately designed, he said, so that they can be closed off to create privacy or facilitate or open focused work and be combined with adjoining spaces for larger gatherings.
“We now make sure that each space has three functions that it can be associated with, whether it be a
Zoom
room, a team room or a more private office space, ‘Vecchione added.
“We’ve been building the headquarters for 50 years. It’s not a short-term decision,” Dimon said in October. “We are very excited about the public spaces of the building, the latest technology and health and wellness facilities, among others.”
Employees who worked out of 270 Park before the pandemic included managers, traders, bankers, lenders and administrative staff. The variety of roles means that a completely flexible layout can present challenges; due to regulatory reasons, there are strict information barriers between certain departments that will make it difficult to investigate, for example, an investment banker and an equities analyst.
The New York YIMBY website, which monitors major real estate projects, unveiled an early version of 270 Park Avenue, acknowledging that it “could already be obsolete.” JPMorgan has not released any official versions.
Amanda Carroll, a managing director at architecture firm Gensler, said post-pandemic offices will also increasingly include features that support connections between personal and remote workers.
“Tenants think of spaces that are acoustically sound – with higher quality audio and visual capabilities – and lighting,” Carroll said. “If you join a distance with your team, you do not want a subpar experience, and vice versa.”
According to Vecchione, there are, among other things, layouts that can best serve the world where more communication and meetings take place at least in part on the screens.
“We’re really trying to look at sight lines,” Vecchione said. “You do not want to be on a Zoom chat and there is someone behind you eating.”
IBM is looking for a large, ‘nimble’ NYC office
Other tenants outside JPMorgan have stated their intentions to create customizable workspaces. IBM, for example, told Insider it wanted to rent about 300,000 square feet in Manhattan for what it said would be a “deft” office.
The technology giant expresses the same desire for flexibility that JPMorgan Chase wants, and a departure from the former office design.
“We’re creating more agile, open and flexible collaboration spaces,” said Joanne Wright, Vice President of Operations and Services at IBM. “We can see that people in a group show up and meet and are innovative, or it can be a space for individual learning cells and problem solving, and then an open garage event for customers. If people come back, it will be because they wants an experience. ‘